The layoffs announced last week at the Washington Post were disfiguring to the esteemed news organization, with whole sections and departments—sports, books, staff photography—wiped away, and devastating cuts inflicted on its Metro section and foreign bureaus. But the extent of the damage is actually greater than first reported.
News reports about the layoffs, including this one from the New York Times, generally agreed that about one-third of the Post’s newsroom would be eliminated by the layoffs. However, an accounting by the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, the union that represents Post journalists, finds that the paper’s management eliminated closer to half of the journalists it used to employ.
According to guild steward Sarah Kaplan, a Post climate reporter, the paper is dropping between 350 and 375 journalists. With the newsroom’s pre-layoff strength at 790 people, that means between 44 percent and 47.5 percent of the newsroom has been axed.
In a dreadful era for journalism jobs, the Post’s bloodbath stands out: last week may have been the biggest one-day wipeout of journalists in a generation.
Previous reports said that nearly 300 union members were among those laid off last week. That figure did not account for dozens more layoffs among Post journalists who aren’t covered by the Guild’s contract, including staffers in its foreign bureaus and editors and managers in Washington.
Take, for example, the Post’s “news hub” in Seoul. The office was expanded in 2021 as part of a plan to report news around the clock; when Washington was in the wee hours, reporters in London or South Korea could jump on breaking stories. The closure of the Korean hub will affect more than a dozen people, most of whom weren’t union members.
Because Post employees were informed individually that their jobs had been cut, it took several days for Kaplan and the Guild to assemble a fuller picture.
A Post spokesperson did not respond to a Washingtonian request for comment.
Correction: an earlier version of this article mistakenly referred to Sarah Kaplan as a Metro reporter.
Paul Farhi covered the news media and other topics during 35 years as a Washington Post reporter. He’s been a freelance reporter since 2024.
